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Two Islands, One Commodity: Cuba, Java, and the Global Sugar Trade (1790-1930)

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Two Islands, One Commodity: Cuba, Java, and the Global Sugar Trade (1790-1930) New West Indian Guide Vol. 86, no. 3-4 (2012), pp. 237-262 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-113828 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0028-9930 ULBE BOSMA & JONATHAN CURRY-MACHADO TWO ISLANDS, ONE COMMODitY: CUBA, JAVA, AND THE GLOBAL SUGAR TRADE (1790-1930) Sugar had, by the eighteenth century, become a global commodity. It origi- nated in East Asia and plantations in the Americas fed the growing taste for its use in Europe as its consumption became increasingly popular (Mintz 1985). The 1791 Revolution in Saint Domingue (Haiti) and the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade prompted shifts in the epicentres of sugar, the most important of these arguably being to Cuba and Java. These two fertile islands saw the burgeoning development of sugar-plantation systems with major inputs of foreign capital and forced labor: Cuba with slavery in place until 1886 and Java with its Cultivation System (1830-1870) which forced the population to spend part of their time and land growing cash crops for the colonial government. In the process the two islands each, respectivel y, became central to the very much truncated Spanish and Dutch colonial empires left after the Napoleonic wars and the Latin American wars of liber- ation; and by the mid-nineteenth century for Cuba, and by the late nineteenth century for Java, they had been catapulted to global sugar pre-eminence. The positioning of the two islands in the global commodity market was not new. Both Cuba and Java were located in regions that had been absorbed into the global economy from the earliest days of modern European history: following the landing of Columbus in Cuba in 1492, and the Portuguese con- quest of Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, in 1512. It was in the nineteenth century, however, that the economies of Cuba and Java became overwhelm- ingly integrated into, and dependent on, the world market with its booms and depressions, and increasingly reliant on sugar exports at the expense of other important crops, such as tobacco and coffee. Both Java and Cuba are relatively large islands, with soils and climate well suited for growing a number of export commodity crops. Three in par- ticular figured prominently in the history of both islands: coffee, tobacco, and sugar cane (Table 1). However, the export-crop economy of both Cuba and Java became, through the nineteenth century, increasingly dominated by sugar. Though most of Java is tropical, its sugar belt was located in the New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 86 no. 3 & 4 (2012):237-262 238 ULBE BOSMA & JONATHAN CURRY-MACHADO Eastern Salient, which was in many respects similar to subtropical Cuba with a dry and a wet season and fertile soil. Table 1. Production of Coffee, Tobacco and Sugar in Java and Cuba, 1750-1900 (metric tons) Coffee Tobacco Sugar Java* Cuba† Java** Cuba†† Java*** Cuba††† 1750 963 0 0 1,141 3,680 4,969 1800 7,316 625 0 2,396 3,700 28,761 1850 69,144 6,220 574 3,619 102,000 294,952 1900 42,752 2,105 30,200 17,858 744,000 309,195 * 1800, estimated early 1800s average (Bulbeck et al. 1998). † export figures, five-year averages. High point of 23,130 reached in 1830-34. 1900, using figures from 1890-94 (García 2008). ** 1800 & 1850 (Korthals-Altes 1991:158, Mansvelt 1939:33). †† earliest production figures from 1761 (Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Real Consulado y Junta de Fomento, 209/9454, No. 10, with thanks to Charlotte Cosner) (Sarmiento Ramírez 2004:68, Stubbs 1989). *** Data for 1750, average for 1750s; 1800, using data from 1797 (Bulbeck et al. 1998). ††† 1750 and 1800, export figures. Before 1895-98 war, 1,110,991 was reached (1894) (Moreno 1978:v.3). Nevertheless, by the final decades of the century European beet sugar was causing a collapse in world sugar prices. While production in Java continued to grow steadily – thanks to the fact that it was able to access the growing Japanese, Indian, and Chinese markets – Cuba’s industry suffered collapse, accentuated by the impact of the island’s three wars of independence (1868- 78, 1879-80, and 1895-98). Nevertheless, the early years of the twentieth century again brought rapid growth, such that by 1920 only 8 percent of the value of Cuba’s exports came from anything else (Santamaría 2001:399). With their highly vertically integrated industries, the two islands were the two largest cane-sugar exporters in the world, between them supplying more than half of the available cane sugar on the world market by 1870 – a pre- eminence that was maintained until the 1930s, when the sugar industry of both went into decline (see Figures 1 and 2). CUBA, JAVA, AND THE GLOBAL SugAR TRADE 239 Figure 1. Sugar-cane production (million tons), Cuba and Java, and share of world sugar cane1 20 18 16 14 12 Cuba 10 Java World 8 6 4 2 0 1825 1830 1840 1850 1860 1875 1880 1890 1900 1915 1920 1925 1930 1939 Figure 2. Cuba and Java share of world sugar cane2 45 40 35 30 25 Cuba % 20 Java % 15 10 5 0 1825 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1930 1. Sources: Galloway 1989:212, Moreno Fraginals 1978, Santamaría 2001. 2. Sources: Galloway 1989:212, Moreno Fraginals 1978, Santamaría 2001. 240 ULBE BOSMA & JONATHAN CURRY-MACHADO There has been an abundance of studies on Cuba and Java each in their own right, but none systematically examines their parallel trajectories. Situated as they are in opposite hemispheres, Cuba has always been studied in the context of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Java in that of Asian Studies. As a result, they have been analyzed as part of two entirely different worlds; and two distinct imperial blocks (the Spanish and Dutch). Yet the question arises as to how sugar came to dominate the agriculture, industry, and trade of these two islands; and how these two islands in particular, in two different colonial systems and parts of the world, should rise to sugar pre- eminence in the way they did and when they did. Are there connections and similarities between the two that help explain this phenomenon? The article seeks to analyze the conditions that led Java and Cuba to become the prime cane-sugar exporters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It starts by suggesting that in both Cuba and Java, the initiative for developing the sugar industry originated in the close link that connected their dominant elites not just to their respective imperial networks, but importantly to transnational, transimperial trade and capital. Of particular importance was the way in which this stimulated technological and scientific innovation in both, catapulting the sugar industry of the two islands to global prominence. This was enabled not only through the introduction of the latest advances in machinery and method, but also the immigration of skilled technical workers from Europe and North America. New sugar frontiers were opened on both islands that offered room for expansion at a time of rapidly growing demand for sugar in Europe, which could not be met by the smaller, long-established plantation islands that suffered from environmental degradation and an absence of available space. But for this to occur, radical changes needed to be made to the system of land ownership and use. At the same time, on both fertile islands the sugar industries each had their own way of finding a solution for mobilizing and ensuring sufficient labor without jeopardizing the colonial order. This question eventually came to dominate the political system through which social control could be ensured, particularly because Cuba and Java came to be ever more closely tied to global capital and trade; and both islands became dominated by sugar while at the same time coming to dominate global sugar production. LOCAL PLANTOCRACY, TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS, AND THE RISE OF CUBAN AND JAVANESE SugAR Since the sixteenth century, commodity crops played a key role in the Euro- pean colonization of Asia and the Americas. European demand for sugar increasingly outstripped the limited cultivation of cane in the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands, and so was introduced early on as a colonial plantation CUBA, JAVA, AND THE GLOBAL SugAR TRADE 241 crop. Cuba had significant strategic importance for the Spanish empire due to its geographical location, with Havana in particular operating as a key Atlantic port city, first for Spain’s bullion armadas, and by the eighteenth century for tobacco trade. Although sugar cane was cultivated on the island in only small, relatively insignificant quantities, it began to play an important role in the local economy. Java likewise acquired an early strategic value for the Dutch empire, ever since Batavia, present-day Jakarta, was founded in 1619 to act as the hub for Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) operations. After the VOC had lost Taiwan with its sugar plantations to the Chinese in 1662 and its attempts to turn Mauritius into a flourishing sugar island had failed, it concentrated its sugar production on Java where it imposed a monopoly on this crop. The center of gravity was around Batavia where VOC officials owned private lands, which they rented out to Chinese millers, who produced under a VOC monopoly. In the course of the eighteenth century sugar production was spreading along the north coast of Java. Sugar was an important commodity for the VOC’s intra-Asian trade, mostly taken as ballast since it was only under exceptional circumstances profitable as a primary commodity.
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